My first two practice entries shared the same grey/green/blue color scheme, so I opted to pump a little more color into this next one.

Title: Cartoon Kingdom

Time Spent: 3 hours

Assets Used: Unreal Stylized Rendering Demo Assets

This level was created using assets from Unreal’s ‘Stylized Rendering’ demo, which contained models and textures with an artistic, cartoon-like aesthetic.

I wanted to create a scenic view of a path leading towards a capital city surrounded by castle walls, and I feel like this was a decent first attempt. I wanted to create a level that felt bright and diverse, and I feel like these assets were the perfect fit. If I were to improve on this, I think that I would fix some tree placement, and add a little more detail to the city in the background.

Like this:

Here’s a recent attempt at creating a rocky island with an abandoned tower near the terrain’s apex. This project took approximately 4 hours to create. I wanted the scene to be slightly more realistic, but noticed that the rocks made everything look too grey. If I were to recreate this scene in the future, I’d add a bit of color, maybe some foliage or other props to mix things up.

I also learned a bit about optimizing my level design. During the development of this stage, I had used a foliage brush to randomize rock placements. This brush caused a significant dip in my frame rate since it was generating thousands of high-poly smaller rocks in the scene. I noticed that placing assets in clever and unique ways helped to reduce my foliage brush usage and limit my frame rate issues.

Like this:

Hey there! Long time no see! I’m currently working on some level design projects that I would like to share. I would appreciate any critique or feedback that you guys are willing to provide! Thanks!

This is a quick hill design that I created a while back. This was my first time working with Unreal Engine and I decided to challenge myself by only using the engine’s default starter assets and the terrain tool. This is probably one of my simplest and ugliest works in Unreal, but this was my first level created with Unreal and I wanted to keep it in mind to see where I end up in comparison later down the road.

As this is a quick prototype (took roughly 1 hour to complete), there are no real gameplay elements in the level. Future projects will include actual space for players to move around as well since blocking volumes will ensure that they do not leave the level.

Like this:

This post is over a month late as Global Game Jam 2015 occurred on January 23-25, but hey, at least I’m posting about it!

I’ve been approached a few times with questions regarding game jams, so I figure I’ll elaborate here. Put simply, game jams are one of the best ways of improving your skills as a game developer. It’s a bold statement I know, but I think it’s fairly accurate.

Game jams are community events that encourage game developers of all sorts to get together and develop games.

Easy enough right? Well, there is a catch. There are usually restrictions associated with the development process. There’s often a time limit, many game jams (e.g. Global Game Jam) require you to make and submit a game within a 48-hour time span (You are always welcomed to continue work on it afterwards though). Some may last months at a time (e.g. One Game A Month).

Some jams also require you to base your game around a specific topic, which is disclosed at the beginning of the event. Other jams may leave the topic completely up to the developer, but could restrict genre (e.g. Fuck This Jam). Group sizes, team roles, and other restrictions can be brought forth, it really depends on how the game jam’s organizing crew puts it together.

The key element of a game jam, in my opinion, is the time limit. It forces a deadline on developers and encourages them to build a playable product within a period of time. These hard deadlines are a great way to motivate developers to attempt completing projects. It’s very easy to fall into a slump when making games, and it’s common to see people quitting projects before fully seeing them through. Giving people hard deadlines helps this problem to an extent.

I believe that it is extremely beneficial for developers to get together with their communities and participate in game jams, these events are great for learning, personal growth and networking, so I definitely recommend attending local and global game jams if you plan to become a game developer. Heck, show up even if you don’t intend to make games, it’s a fantastic opportunity to see how your local game community operates. Many notable indie game titles started as game jam prototypes.

With that said, let’s talk about my personal experience with Global Game Jam 2015.

We had a team of around 7 people working together for the first time during the jam. With such a large group and no evident leader, we found that everything was extremely unorganized, so we’ll be preparing to make things more efficient if we work together in the future.

The event was held at the local college, so we opted to use their computers to develop a flash game using Actionscript and Flixel. No one had actually known how to develop in flash, so it was a completely fresh learning experience. As a rule, you should probably use a programming language that you’re comfortable with when trying to make a game in 48 hours. We knew it would be messy, but we were interested in what the results would be, so we did it anyways.

Much of the development was planned for the final day, and of course, a power outage happened to fall on the last day of the jam. As a result, we lost a huge chunk of our planned time, and were unable to get remotely close to what we wanted.

It was a bit of a disaster, we weren’t able to get solid assets down, the gameplay and mechanics were nowhere to be seen, and there wasn’t even a way to end the game.

But it was a fantastic learning experience that gave us a lot of insight about working together, and a lot of knowledge about Flash. We were able to learn enough to at least get something up and running within a 48-hour time span, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

Like this:

JungleShoots is an early attempt of mine at building a first-person shooter using the Unity engine.

The game took about a week to put together, using many references and guides that I found on the internet. It was meant to be a quick test game that I used to learn the ropes of Unity and coding in C#, so it is by no means a complete product.

The game is a simple multi-player FPS where players shoot at each other. Networking is fully functional, allowing up to 20 players to join a room.

JungleShoots(name pending) is fairly bare-bones at the moment. If I decide to work on it later, I would probably add actual character models and animations, sound, AI bots, a scoring system, and a few other simple elements.

Things that I took away from this project:

Monodevelop/C# coding fundamentals

Unity Engine basics

Network coding

Raycasting

First Person Controllers

Physics systems

Animation

Collision detection

Unity is an excellent platform to start developing on, there are a great deal of resources available online, and many of them are completely free.